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Inlooh: Replacing gift-registries with a fun, social, and worthwhile experience

iCrowdNewswire - Apr 28, 2016

Inlooh

Replacing gift-registries with a fun, social, and worthwhile experience

We’re kicking gift registries out the door with our unique combination of tribefunding, event-based social media, and e-commerce, creating a revolutionary experience that all gift givers and receivers will love.

On a beautiful Pinterest meets Facebook platform, gifters and giftees collaborate on gift ideas and benefit from the common wealth of knowledge within one’s social network. This is a more satisfying, useful, and fluid process than normal registries. Plus, our expanding network of vendors compete for your businesses, offering discounts as much as 30% off registry items.

After finishing our prototype in November 2015, we’re gearing up for a soft launch in April followed by a hard launch in August of this year. Join us as Inlooh becomes the preferred event-gifting service on the planet!

The $18 billion gift registry market has barely evolved in nearly 100 years. The process is time-intensive for event hosts and extremely limiting for guests. Often, guests are not able to fully convey their emotional or financial potential with a pre-set registry. What’s the common denominator?

The problem is the LIST; the worst 4-letter word of them all.

At Inlooh, we’re tired of the same old gift registry malaise, and have a hunch you’re ready for a change too.

So instead of continuing to create worthless lists with things you’re supposed to have and awkwardly sending to your guests who then have to further perpetuate the silly toaster buying apathy, choose Inlooh for your next registry.

Our approach is social, simple, and rewarding, a way for people to be inspired and learn what they really need. We seamlessly integrate three key aspects of life that we all know and love: social media, crowdfunding, and e-commerce.

On Inlooh, your guests help you learn and decide what to buy from the get go by sharing their gift ideas on your event page. They can offer personal advice, showing you specific product examples, support suggestions from other guests, and answer questions about the usefulness of a product — i.e. “Did you actually use that $1,000 industrial blender you got at your wedding?”

Ultimately, though, the choice is yours. On Inlooh, you are in control of what you want, but this time, with way more help and knowledge.

Guests gift any amount of money they want (more or less) for the gift idea. The confidential gift donations are collected through an online payment gateway and loaded onto an Inlooh Prepaid MasterCard. Purchases can be made anywhere for anything, including at merchants competing for a share of your gift spending with targeted offers.

This way, if you decide you really need a pricier item or experience instead of a bunch of small ones, you can use your guest’s financial contributions towards something that brings you the most joy. It’s money meant to make your life better, after all.

When a gift idea gets posted on your Facebook-like event page, a button appears right next to it, linking you to the purchase page. You can easily see the final cost and all the information you need to make the decision.

Perhaps the biggest value-add of all, as part of the e-commerce process, our network of merchants compete to offer you the best price possible on the item you want. For example, you can specify that you are looking for home improvement items and get tailored offers from merchants like Home Depot and Lowe’s withexclusive offers of up to 30% off.

In short, Inlooh removes the LIST and replaces the online gift registry with an extraordinarily fun and worthwhile gift giving experience.

Carter is not getting married himself, but has a friend who is. Carter has been to a handful of weddings in his life and knows the drill: sometime soon, he’s going to get details of a gift registry, at which point he is expected to make a purchase from a list of products he would never buy for his friends. And of course, he’s always one of the last people to buy from the list and usually ends up with the worst presents. Carter has no emotional connection to the gifts and just ends up giving cash, which isn’t very gratifying either. He doesn’t want this to happen again, so he tells his engaged friend about Inlooh. His buddy agrees that this is a much better gifting process and easily convinces his fiance of the same.

We have been testing our prototype since November and are ready to complete the remainder of the website and launch a pilot with 1,000 couples to test the user experience and solicit feedback.

By the time of our hard launch in August, we plan to have hundreds of merchant partners signed up with us, starting with the top three wedding registry retailers: Macy’s, Target, and Bed Bath & Beyond. The advantage of Inlooh is that merchants who may not normally be considered for bridal registries — perhaps because of expense or unique offerings — can now attract new customers. We will be recruiting both national and local merchants to join. Our goal is that anywhere our customers want to shop, eat, or pay for a service or product, there will be an Inlooh merchant available.

We are using weddings as a gateway to other life events, such as honeymoons, birthdays, baby showers, graduation, bar/bat mitzvahs, retirement, surprise parties, Christmas, etc. Soon, Inlooh will be ubiquitous with gift giving of any kind!

Tim is the original founder of the idea for Inlooh. A friend of his was getting married and sent along a link to the registry he and his fiance had created. Tim despised the process and found it very rude and impersonal. He knew his friends weren’t rude and impersonal, rather, it was the system that created such behaviour but had no competition to stop it.

At the same time, Tim knew that he is difficult to shop for, which is why people just gave him gift cards. A system in which wedding guests have to figure something out on their own seemed just as daunting. Tim’s own mom was constantly giving him gift cards for places he doesn’t even like. The card simply sat on his dresser unused leaving neither of them satisfied.

That’s when he came up with Inlooh: a system where he could put money into a friend’s account, recommend something they should buy with the money, but be satisfied even if they don’t because he knows they are getting what they want. Tim’s mom can now put money into his Inlooh account for Christmas or his birthday and he can get exactly what he wants. Better yet, if Inlooh partnered with merchants, everybody would save money on their purchases.

Tim has over 17 years of both traditional and pharmaceutical marketing and advertising experience. He has worked on top brands such as Enbrel, Cialis, Crestor, and Dairy Queen. In 2004, he was the youngest VP ever at Saatchi and Saatchi, one of the largest firms in New York, at the age of 29. Throughout his career, he has developed big ideas that have helped propel brands to multi-billions in annual sales. Tim’s achievements have been recognized by top pharmaceutical companies and across the advertising industry. In 2009, Tim launched his first entrepreneurial venture, Chef Pak, which quickly became a household name among professional chefs and culinary students.

Greg has launched and managed five new businesses in heavily regulated and competitive markets that grew to between $10MM and $82MM of revenue within the first three years. As a successful leader of startups, he has established global partnering and reseller agreements with multi-billion dollar companies. Greg has successfully sold two companies as a partner and CEO and co-raised over $60MM of venture capital. He has co-developed and launched several new financial/marketing products in over 20 different countries, receiving several innovation awards along the way. Greg has also received the highest sales performance awards, reserved only for a few, in several large global companies. He is our decision maker and business visionary.

Joel has more than 20 years of professional art direction, design, and production experience across various industries. He’s created packaging for L’Oreal and Maybelline, developed interactive design for the late, great Silicon Valley cornerstone Pseudo.com and partnered in the Brooklyn, NY-based industrial design shop Firebrand. Over the better part of the last decade, Joel has focused his energy into advertising. He climbed the ranks in art departments of large and small NYC agencies; those years imbued Joel with a definitive perspective on brand- building and marketing. At his core, Joel is an entrepreneur and Inlooh represents the convergence of an ideal professional and personal endeavor. Leading the creative vision for a product with such a fundamental value in the gift-giving arena, while building a brand from the ground up, is an exhilarating next chapter in his career.

David is a front-end developer with over 10 years of experience in creative problem solving and a penchant for business and technology. Years of freelance development, project management and consultative work have given him an acute sense of how to balance between business desires and user needs. Today he enjoys the privilege of lending his talent and expertise to Inlooh — a startup that enables him to do what he does best: find elegant, effective solutions to multifariously dense issues.